A World of Sounds

I’m hoping that this part of my academic career will lead to a B.A. in humanities with a minor in theatre and in that an interdisciplinary degree in scenic design.

This probably means I’ll be spending lots of time in theatre classes and hopefully in the scene shop. I’m très excited about both!

In composition class we’ve been doing peer reviews. We gather round each other’s papers and offer criticism that is constructive. I embarked on a really ambitious paper and didn’t realize the challenges that it might present. I had constructed a paper that was a little confusing, but thankfully I was with a group of really insightful folks and we worked it out.

I’m taking stagecraft this semester, it’s the first year that IU East has offered it. I’m a little worried it might be the only one ever; the theatre program at school is currently in limbo.

Our classes meet at the Murray Theatre. It’s a gorgeous turn-of-the-century vaudeville house. The lobby walls are lined in marble, and there are burgundy and green mosaics trimming the floor.

Our professor is David Marsee; he’s the technical director there. Right now we’re working on the set for The Diary of Anne Frank.

We need 30 hours or so of lab for stagecraft, so I decided to design the sound for Anne Frank. This project includes putting the reigns on the sound effects and whatever music might be used. There are a lot of ambient type sounds that occur in the Franks’ realm, so the challenge is to make them blend and make them seem a part of whatever else is going on. About 68 sounds are in the foreseeable future.

In leaving class the other day, I noticed a pile of shoes at the back of the auditorium. “The costume folks must have left them there,” I thought. And then I drew a parallel between the Holocaust museum and the shoes... it was kinda spooky.

There’s also work-study this semester. I work in the Humanities and Fine Arts/Natural Science and Mathematics office. There’s always lots of filing that needs to be done, in addition to helping professors with whatever they might need as they dash off to class.